Niche news the future for traditional and new media, says PEJ report

Most news organisations are becoming niche operations, raising the idea of more collaboration between newsrooms and online and offline businesses, a new report suggests.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism's (PEJ) annual State of the News Media study for 2010 says news outlets are becoming "more specific in focus, brand and appeal and narrower, necessarily, in ambition".

"Old media are trying to imagine the new smaller newsroom of the future in the relic of their old ones. New media are imagining the new newsroom from a blank slate," says the study, which looks at trends affecting US news media in 2010, based on data and reports on the industry in 2009.

A more niche operation for news organisations suggests the possibility of more cooperation between 'legacy' and new media outlets and increasing collaboration with citizen journalists. But questions about these issues will not be answered in 2010, but will become more prominent, the study adds.

Trends in online news consumption and a more niche focus suggests an unbundling of traditional news coverage by organisations: "Online, it is becoming increasingly clear, consumers are not seeking out news organisations for their full news agenda. They are hunting the news by topic and by event and grazing across multiple outlets. This is changing both the finances and the culture of newsrooms. When revenue is more closely tied to each story, what is the rationale for covering civic news that is consequential but has only limited interest?

"The data is also beginning to show a shift away from interest in local news toward more national and international topics as people have more access to such information, which may have other effects on local dynamics."

While paywalls may not be a solution for all online news providers, niche news providers may have more success introducing subscription fees, the study suggests.

"Online, news consumers do not range very far. The majority say they use two-to-five sites to get their news. This could be taken as a sign that they are discriminating to a degree. If brands do not totally matter to them, well-known news organizations probably figure somewhere in that mix of 'reliable' sites in consumers' news searches. This could suggest that strategies to serve niches - to be the site that is reliable for a particular kind of information - might yield some paying customers and niche-oriented advertisers," it says.

In its analysis of which topics US internet users go online for, weather, national events and health or medicine came out top. Of those users who said they had a favourite site (just 35 per cent of respondents) major network broadcasters' sites came out top (37 per cent), followed by news aggregators (21 per cent) and local online news sites (13 per cent).

More to follow on the State of the News Media 2010 report....

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